Skip to main content

Tracks In The Snow

    Hey, everyone. It was 5 degrees this morning and there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground. The wind has died down since yesterday. Our water is still frozen and I've decided to go to Lowe's and buy a heater to put under the house and thaw the pipes. I hope they don't burst. By the way, the pipes burst because the water shrinks as it gets colder, allowing more water in. Then, as it heats up you need to have a couple of faucets open to allow for the expansion. If you don't, the expanding water has no place to go.
    We took a bit of time off from the weather related chores to hike through the woods and look at tracks. Snow makes an amateur tracker into a good one, if you catch my drift. It's really fun when you can plainly see what is going on. We found a myriad of rabbit tracks and squirrel tracks. There was an abundance of deer tracks, both male and female. The doe has more of a triangular track while the buck leaves two parallel  marks side by side with a space between them. We found the tracks, like an open book, where a full-grown mountain lion jumped from an oak tree at a deer. I saw where the ground was tore up as the deer's hooves slipped in his haste to get away. There was no blood or fur and the buck got safely away after what was, I'm sure, a terrifying experience. On a steep section of trail we found what appeared to be a black bear track that went through a laurel thicket. What I don't understand is why the rascal is not hibernating. Just my luck to have a bear with insomnia hanging about. I plan on looking in my tracker's book and looking up the habits of the black bear. Finally, we found an abundance of turkey tracks. It's rare for us to see turkeys up here. Today the snow made it possible to see where the huge birds even walked down the length of a fallen tree leaving tracks in the deep snow. I saw where one had dug through the snow and dead leaves and flushed a small animal that was living in a hole. How did he know it was there?
    It's amazing how little I discern of the world I pass through until it snows, then the book is opened and you read until your fingers are numb and you plod home to the fireplace and some hot chocolate; here at the green white retreat.
CE Wills

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Game Review: NFS, Hot Pursuit

    This game was one which I refused to download for a while, even though it was on sale for 99 cents. I thought that it looked boring and narrow. Boy, was I wrong! This game totally kicks butt. It is one of those rare games that will actually give you an adrenaline rush. It is that intense. The developers, EA Games, have recently updated the app to include two main avenues of play. You can either be the cops or the racers who are trying to evade the cops. As a racer you have to deal with cops trying to hit you and make you crash, cops buzzing you with helicopters, oncoming traffic, tack strips spread across the road and roadblocks. In the cop mode you are a cop and you are trying to stop a reckless racer by any means, fair or foul. As a racer you can use nitrous oxide for increased speed, overdrive capability and oil slicks. You also can jam the cops communication with a jamming unit. Like almost all games these days, it gets harder as you go along. I prefer my games to...

Four Free Games

     Hey, everyone. If free games makes the start of a new week a little better, we're in luck. Check these out on your friendly, neighborhood app store. 1) Cowboys vs. Aliens vs. Ninjas- This is a dual stick shooter, much like Mini-Gore . You are an old-west cowboy with a vast array of weapons (earned gradually). You have to move and shoot, avoiding death, as you battle Ninjas and aliens. Some aliens are quite large. Some enemies are big Sumo Wrestlers. There are sword-wielding ninjas and these aliens that yield a mini-nuclear explosion when killed. When your enemies die they leave behind little stacks of money, or skulls. You collect these items because of a strange hobby of trophy grabbing for your macabre collection. Just kidding, the items can be spent or used as the game progresses. This is a good game and I played it for a while last night. 2) The Heist - A puzzle game with a twist. As you try to open a bank vault, you must face a series of different puz...

Bottle On The Doorknob

      Hey, everyone. I took a day of vacation today and really enjoyed it. We went out and bought some flowers. Flowers don't do well up here as a rule so we buy some and have a couple of big pots of assorted flowers on the deck for the summer. This year we are going to set the pots out in the yard a bit. The reason for this is the moisture and dirt in the pots seems to attract ants, scorpions and perhaps gnats. Bloody drag, what?     This weekend there seemed to be a bad odor in the house in the area of the master bedroom and the master bath. We could not isolate what the problem was. We did a number of things, including pouring vinegar and baking soda down the drains, which boils them out in rather spectacular fashion. Put a handful small amount of baking soda down them first, then pour vinegar down them. Very cool.     We finally deduced that a mouse had crawled up between the floor and sub-floor underneath the jacuzzi, after ...